Dorothee J. Fuchs

DOROTHEE J. FUCHS
Dorothee Fuchs, 85 years old, died March 17, 2007, at Cayuga Medical Center, after a short and unexpected illness.
She was born in Gottingen, German, on July 27, 1921, to a physicist father, Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg, and a mathematician mother, Marie Rosenfeld. Her early years were spent in Germany and Czechoslovakia, and in 1939, she and her sister Helen left Berlin for England with a transport organized for Jewish children by the Quakers. The girls quickly learned English and threw themselves into their new life. Her parents had to stay behind; near the end of the war, her mother was sent to a concentration camp, and her father died of grief over the mother's arrest. Her mother was liberated by the Russians in 1945.
In 1943, Dorothee met her husband, Wolfgang Fuchs (also a German refugee), in Aberdeen, Scotland, where she was a student at the university and he was a young mathematics professor. They married in Cambridge that same year. Then ensued many years of happiness together, until he died ten years ago. They came to Ithaca in 1948 and moved here permanently in 1950. They delighted in their three children. They traveled together at the drop of a hat, and they maintained friendships that circled the globe. She ran a most elastic household and was always ready to feed another mouth or make up another guest bed. They relished wherever they were as long as they were together.
Dorothee loved languages, or perhaps more precisely she loved grammar. (Her exacting correction of everybody and anybody's grammatical mistakes has scarred many a delicate psyche.) She spoke English with more attention to nuance than most native speakers, and added Japanese and Italian to her list of languages as well. She loved playing bridge, but only the most bloodthirsty and competitive variety (she was a life master in duplicate bridge). She loved music and trouped to concerts as long as her legs allowed her to -- best of all if she could go with her grandson, Lorenzo.
To say that she tended her garden, kept an impeccable house, played bridge, and devoted herself to her children and her husband is all true, but doesn't go very far in giving an idea of her. She was profoundly unconventional, untrammeled by the opinions of others, elegant, playful, funny, and high-spirited. She was also an inveterate worrier, a consummate teller of anecdotes, and absolutely the most practical, generous, and energetic person you could call when you needed help of any sort at all.
She will be missed by her children Annie (Harley) Campbell, John Fuchs, and Claudia Fuchs (Lewis McClellan); her grandchildren, Storn and Cody Cook and Lorenzo and Natalia McClellan; and her sister Helen Peirce and her children. We will celebrate her in a memorial service at Longview on April 15 at 3:00.